WMMED/Reports/2017

This is a report of activities of Wiki Project Med Foundation for 2017. It is not a complete list of everything we have done this year but represents a highlight of our work. The compiling of this report — like much that we do — has been a group effort, and we encourage involvement by further individuals within the wider membership.

Cochrane has hired a part time editor to help keep Cochrane reviews on Wikipedia up to date. We are seeing extensive and ongoing high quality edits coming from this collaboration. There is continued high level support within their organization to grow this collaboration. A community made bot is tagging Cochrane reviews that are out of date with the newer version that should replace it.

In 2017 we finished updating the lead of all 437 medication articles on the En:WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. The WHO released the list under an open license (CC SA 3.0 IGO) to make the collaboration possible. The list was also brought to featured list status on EN WP.

UCSF efforts continue[1] We had our largest class launch this year with 40 students.

TAU efforts at Sackler School of Medicine continue for the fifth year in the Israeli Med Program with 33 med students participating in the Wiki-Med elective course. In addition, a second WikiMed elective has opened for the first time in the American Med program at Sackler. This elective will spread over 2 year, with the hopes of students doing some related research in their second year of the elective. The second elective is run with the support of WikiEd, and in collaboration with Dr. James Heilman, Dr. Amin Azzam and the ILAE.

App details have been moved to meta to facilitate translation and recognize the multilingual nature of the efforts.

Consensus for the use of small templates in the external links section to raise awareness on EN WP has been gained.[3]

While active installs of the EN version have stagnated at about 58K, the overall ratings of the app remain high at about 4.7. Active installs of other languages however continues to increase. New and smaller version has been launched.

Recognition of all editors who made more than 250 edits to a medical article (regardless of the language they are working in) was distributed in April of 2017 for the 2016 editing year. Top editors listed here. The Cure Award has also been translated into 6 other languages.

Significant progress has been made this year to update the EN Wikipedia infoboxes to human readable content. New infobox is used in more than 1,500 articles.[6]

New ways of engaging with Wikidata have been explored, including participating in WikidataCon 2017 and WikiCite 2017, exploring a collaboration with Gene Wiki and giving medical-related WD assignments to students (Tel Aviv University), and indexing and annotating the biomedical literature in Wikidata, with the Zika corpus serving as a showcase.

Preparation of a series of workshops on Wikimedia and emergency response, which is to start in 2018.

A new process for accepting new members has been devised and implemented, so new members are automatically signed up for the general mailing list, as well as receive a welcome email with important links.

The board has decided that as of 2018, membership should be renewed yearly. A Google form will be sent at the beginning of the year, in order to have an updated yearly list of members, rather than only a general list of all members throughout the years. This decision is specifically relevant in relations to elections, as well as proper registration as an organization in accordance with US laws. Access to members' list remains restricted and highly guarded, with only 3 board members having access to these records.

In 2017, we elected a new board of directors. The board later voted on changing the bylaws so that elections will run every 2 years, instead of yearly. This decision was made considering that we are an international organization and it takes time for new board members to get involved and have an impactful activity. It was decided that a 2-years term will serve the organization better, rather than having changes yearly.